Game Details

Corporal Alessandra Cancellara is heading into a mission on the Skyranger when I notice her. Most of my squaddies are present, looking cool, as the music theoretically pumps both them and me up. But Alessandra, suited up in green with needles holding up her ash-colored bun, stands out. She’s practically dancing in her seat, a bundle of nervous energy and quick grins. I’d probably look like that heading into a massively tense battle zone, so it suddenly hits me: XCOM 2 has managed to find an emotional core.

The first of the rebooted XCOMs, 2012’s Enemy Unknown, was a fantastic strategy game. So was its expansion, Enemy Within. Yet if there was an immediate criticism to be made of both games, it was that they were stylistically... well, dull. The near-future X-Files-like alien invasion storyline only allowed for the most generic science fiction, and the game structure never felt fully committed beyond “well, this is how the 1994 X-COM did it.” In that light, XCOM 2 having a distinct sense of style is a tremendously positive sign.

That sense of style manages to weave itself through the entire game, making XCOM 2 a notable improvement over its predecessor at nearly every conceptual level—but the game does miss the opportunity to make structural improvements.

Vive la revolution!

Further Reading

The core conceptual improvement of XCOM 2 is simple: it takes place in 2035, two decades after the original XCOM, with the premise that the aliens won that war. They’ve taken over the Earth and installed a worldwide government called ADVENT to govern/occupy it. You control the remnants of the XCOM organization, flying all over the world in a converted alien carrier to fight the power. In an especially clever refocusing, some of the ethical issues that the Enemy Within expansion raised and then ignored—like alien/human hybridization and human mech units—are portrayed as villainous acts in XCOM 2, which is a nice touch.

With the new plot, a lot of XCOM’s structural limitation suddenly makes sense. In the original, a worldwide anti-alien organization nonsensically could only deploy six soldiers at once. In XCOM 2, of course a resistance movement can only drop a handful of squaddies into small-scale missions. In the previous XCOM, you’d inexplicably see the same rural American bar & grill level show up in Nigeria and Nagasaki as well as Nacogdoches. In XCOM 2, the aliens have created a unitary worldwide culture where, yes, you could plausibly see the same architecture in Siberia as well as Chile.

It also helps explain why your carrier is scrounging for supplies and how training new recruits can be a massive cost. Instead of just waiting for UFOs to show up, every move you make in this campaign turns into a choice of which advantages you find most preferable and which disadvantages are best avoided.

The advantages of this premise extend to the presentation. By turning XCOM into a resistance story, a whole range of cool aesthetic ideas appear on the table. I’m particularly fond of the loading screens and their Soviet-style alien propaganda and the way your squaddies show up on “Wanted” screens in the high-tech alien cities. There are plenty of nods to other near-future sci-fi, too; the futuristic resistance story reminds me of the final season of Fringe, while music cues in the most high-tech areas remind me of Mass Effect and even Phantasy Star.

The resistance motif also allows for more squaddie customization, which is hugely improved in XCOM 2. There’s a much wider range of hairstyles, including non-ponytail long hair for both women and men plus dreads and afros as well. Tattoos, bandanas, glasses, and armor patterns add a huge amount of personality to individual squaddies, as does an actual personality setting. Alessandra, mentioned up top, had the nervous “Twitchy” personality, which affects both her posture and her in-combat barks. There’s even a way to save custom characters into files to be kept and shared (although this didn’t work as perfectly as I might have hoped when I attempted to make all my squaddies X-Men).

A wider variety of different level settings is a huge help.

Character customization can make for some pretty good looking XCOMX-Men.

Scoping out enemies for a concealed ambush.

Soldiers can be temporarily wounded psychologically as well as physically.

Some friendly (or not-so-friendly) faces reappear from the previous game.

The aliens are super into glitch art these days.

The cinematics largely work, as with this Sharpshooter setting up a snipe.

The random naming scheme can be pretty excellent.

The Ranger class deals heavy close-range damage.

The strategic map offers more interesting choices this time around.

This is incredibly bad news.

XCOM 2's loading screens are filled with mood-setting propaganda.

Yes, there's plenty more research to be done.

XCOM 2 also totally removes the almost totally pointless UFO combat portion of the original game. At first this seems like a good idea (especially if you played The Long War mod, where the combat could ruin your entire game), but the removal has the somewhat negative side effect of making it seem like player agency has been lost. Instead of actively blowing up UFOs and investigating them, the strategic situation now consists largely of waiting for new missions.

There are a few missions that pull UFOs into the game, including one where you assault a grounded UFO and another awesomely intense mission where your carrier gets shot down. But XCOM 2’s mission randomness, which so often seems like a strength, can bizarrely keep these missions hidden for entire campaigns.

Ground-pounders

While the tactical core of XCOM 2 is only slightly altered from the original, most of the changes are clear improvements. The biggest change is that almost every mission now has a timer attached to it. For example, aliens are attacking a transmitter and you have to get to it before it gets blown up, or a laptop with critical data needs to be hacked before time runs out. These are largely good ways to push players out of over-careful play—most missions in 2012’s XCOM could too easily be manipulated by just having squaddies wait in Overwatch. Here, you have to actually move.

A second major addition is a sneaky mode at the start of most missions where your characters are hidden until they attack or get too close to enemies. It’s occasionally cool to use this function to set up kill zones that remove enemy patrols at the start of missions. Most of the time, though, it feels slightly overdone. The concept works best in conjunction with the timed missions: if you only have eight turns to fight your way into a building, deciding when to pull the trigger on a “good enough” ambush versus waiting another turn for the perfect one can be a difficult and compelling choice.

The core squaddie classes have also been redesigned. Some, like the Grenadier (Heavy) and Sharpshooter (Sniper) are conceptually similarly to their predecessors, but the close-combat Ranger class has been given a sword and a whole range of stealth and melee skills. The Specialist is a far more interesting variation on XCOM 1’s Support class, with a drone that can deliver healing to allies or hack enemy mechs from afar.

The net effect is slightly disorienting. None of the classes feels entirely “normal,” which aids the feeling of tactical teamwork, but it also makes the game feel arbitrarily difficult. That said, the skills can get immensely cool at times. I won one battle against Chrysalids by sending a Ranger with the “Blademaster” skill into the front lines. Every time they came near her, she slashed aliens to death before they had a chance to attack.

As for the battles themselves, they’re tightly honed improvements on an already stellar form. XCOM’s two-action turns are back, and they still work as well as ever. The new procedurally generated levels add a critical element of variety to each map.

Meanwhile, the tremendously destructible environments add some great tactical options. At one point, I came across a heavily defended alien installation with two big scary turrets staring me down from the roof. I fired a grenade at one of them to shred its armor, only to discover that the explosion made the entire roof cave in, which in turn made the turret collapse. Watching walls fall as you blast at aliens in front of and behind them proves immensely satisfying.

Destructibility was present in the first XCOM, but various glitches prevented it from being fully comprehensible. In that game, dice rolls from before the shot was fired clearly decided whether a shot was a “hit” or not regardless of the animation. That’s fixed here for the most part, as bullets and lasers strike where they’re supposed to and destroy walls where they don’t. Other quirks are fixed, too: a camera zoom no longer indicates immediate death as a shot is fired, and dead squaddies don’t have their hair pop off like helmets. There are still glitches—for example, cars collapsing and shooting glass out before their animations actually show the explosions—but they no longer feel like they’re actually showing game flaws.

There are several other small changes, all largely positive. Armor no longer simply provides an addition to hit points but instead adds a constant defensive buffer for units that needs to be dismantled or bypassed. Hacking mechanized enemies or ADVENT towers creates choices that are consistently interesting little gambles. This is still arguably the best tactical combat system available in the genre.